Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/311

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CHAP. IV
EXTENSITY AND EXTENSION
289

impressed with the idea that all our sensationsBut modern psychology has a tendency to regard all sensation as primarily extensive. are in some degree extensive. It is maintained, not without an appearance of reason, that there is no sensation without extensity[1] or without a feeling 'of volume.'[2] English idealism sought to reserve to tactile perception a monopoly of the extended, the other senses dealing with space only in so far as they remind us of the data of touch. A more attentive psychology reveals to us, on the contrary, and no doubt will hereafter reveal still more clearly, the need of regarding all sensations as primarily extensive, their extensity fading and disappearing before the higher intensity and usefulness of tactile, and also, no doubt, of visual, extensity.

So understood, space is indeed the symbol of fixity and of infinite divisibility. ConcreteWe invert reality when we regard rest as logically anterior to motion, space as the necessary antecedent to movements. extensity, that is to say the diversity of sensible qualities, is not within space; rather is it space that we thrust into extensity. Space is not a ground on which real motion is posited; rather is it real motion that deposits space beneath itself. But our imagination, which is preoccu-

  1. Ward, Article Psychology in the Encycl. Britannica.
  2. W. James, Principles of Psychology, vol. ii, p. 134 et seq.—We may note in passing that we might, in strictness, attribute this opinion to Kant, since The Transcendental Æsthetic allows no difference between the data of the different senses as far as their extension in space is concerned. But it must not be forgotten that the point of view of the Critique is other than